Finding great opportunities – particularly in verticals you aren’t deeply familiar with – is one of the most difficult and time consuming parts of content promotion and link building process.

Enter BuzzSumo - a new tool that makes this process a little easier. It’s a great fit for BuzzStream users, especially those who are looking for opportunities to build links and get found through tactics like infographics, guest posts, giveaways, interviews, and more. (BuzzSumo and BuzzStream are not affiliated in any way, beyond a mutual desire to help marketers.)

In today’s post, I’m show you how to use BuzzSumo with BuzzStream to (achieve content promotion and get great placements and ultimately ring the cash register.)

Introducing BuzzSumo: a Powerful Content Placement Prospecting Tool

BuzzSumo is a neat, relatively new tool that helps marketers find highly shared content, along with influencers in specific areas. While there are tons of tools to find influencers on Twitter and other networks, BuzzSumo has some unique features that enable you to find not just people, but content promotion and placement opportunities quickly and easily.

An Example Project: Using Content Marketing to Build Awareness and Links in a Specific Niche

For example, let’s say I’m launching a new company that makes smart crock pots. (Sort of like Nest for Crock Pots. As it turns out, Belkin has announced plans for these.) In this scenario, I’ve done some market analysis, and I’ve found out that people that follow the paleo diet use crock pots, tend to be early adopters, and like playing with new technology. An addressable market interested in my offering? Awesome. This will be a great ‘head pin’ market (see ‘Crossing the Chasm’ for more on vertical-by-vertical strategy.)

As part of my launch, I want to:

Guest post on relevant paleo blogs with crockpot recipes.

Place my crockpot infographics on blogs that appeal to the paleo audience.

Give away products and get reviews where the numbers make sense, based on audience size and conversion rate estimates.

All of these activities will also result in links, which will eventually help my site rank for relevant terms. But until search demand catches up with the awesomeness of my crock pots, I’ll have to go out and generate demand.

Using BuzzSumo to Source Opportunities

Now that I’ve outlined my assets and understand what I’m trying to accomplish, I can go out and source some opportunities.

Normally to find opportunities like those, I would create a number of prospecting queries, and spend a great deal of time looking through SERPs and vetting opportunities. It’s not quite hunting for a needle in a haystack, but it is time consuming and requires some expertise and experience.

By contrast, I can use BuzzSumo, and find some opportunities quickly. I won’t generate as extensive a list as I would if I used several tools and spent many hours researching, but as far as getting a pretty good list in a few minutes, it will work well.

BuzzSumo is a particularly good tool for implementing the ’10 in 10 minutest’ test Paddy Moogan talks about in his book (paid) and Linking Outside the Box (free w/ opt-in). If you can’t find several good placement opportunities for your newest content idea quickly with BuzzSumo, it might be time to go back to the drawing board before you commit too many resources to production and promotion.

Now let’s look at how I’d use BuzzSumo to find those opportunities.

Finding New Content Promotion Opportunities with BuzzSumo: Step by Step

Step 2: Select what sort of opportunities and time frame I’m looking for:

In my case, I’m looking for infographics placements, guest posts (in this case, usually guest recipes), and giveaways. I’ll cast a pretty wide net for timeframe – anything in the last 6 months will work.

So, I’ll select those options from the bar on the left:

Step 3: Add my keywords

Now that I’ve selected what kinds of opportunities I’m looking for, I’ll add some topical keywords to help me find the right kind of paleo diet sites. Always remember, the keywords that hold content promotion opportunities are typically very different than the SEO keywords I’d try to rank for.

BuzzSumo needs synonyms to bring back a decent number of opportunities, so I’ll go ahead and add some related categorical terms, in this case:

(You can generate these synoyms through a variety of methods, but the quickest and dirtiest way is probably looking at the similar searches at the bottom of the Google SERP.)

Step 4: Press ‘Search’ and Watch the Magic Happen

Now BuzzSumo will return a screen full of results for me:

I can sort them by whichever social network is most important to my audience, which in the case of the crock pot example is Facebook. So I’ll sort my results by Facebook shares:

And now I have list of opportunities sorted by social traction! Excellent.

Step 5: Click Thru and Add These Opportunities to My BuzzStream Account with the BuzzMarker

The simplest way to then get these great opportunities into my BuzzStream account is to click on them, and then use the BuzzMarker, BuzzStream’s Bookmarklet, to automatically add them to my account.

BuzzStream, as always, gathers contact information, metrics, and recent content, so I can start deciding what to offer to each blog, research it further, and start my outreach.

Matt works on customer acquisition at BuzzStream. Before BuzzStream, he worked as an SEO Strategist at Portent and a Marketing Manager at AppCentral (acquired by Good Technology).
You can follow Matt on Twitter or Google Plus.

Hey Joe,
Yes! There are. We’ve been heads down working on a big new feature which we’ll announce soon. We’ve also been working hard on growing our development team and getting new developers up to speed, so we can add even more great functionality.
thanks
matt